Eat what when? (especially meat)

[JeuneKoq]

When is the best time to eat meat (proteins), when to eat fruits and when to eat vegetables?

The instinctonutrition way as advocated by GCB seems to typically present fruits at lunch, and meats at diner, both meals accompanied with vegetables if the senses desire them. I wonder what is the main reasoning behind this?

Plenty of naturopaths, including mine, tells their patients to eat meat at breakfast and/or lunch, sweet fruits at snack (aprox 4pm) and "vegetarian" (so vegetables) at diner. Of course they assume the patient is eating cooked, and that cooked meat at diner will lead to poor sleep.

So if I had one meal of animal products, should it rather be at lunch or at diner?
When did our ancestors go hunting or catching insects? It would seem likely to me that they would not risk going far from their camp to hunt when it's getting dark. So we would be adapted to eating meat at noon-ish. Or maybe they seized any opportunity to get meat, be it morning or afternoon. Before we hunted large animals, we just had to be lucky to stumble on some carcass, and that could probably be at any time of the day, except if pre-humans were more adventurous at a specific time (noon?).

[TylerDurden]

Who cares about times of day for eating? Just eat whatever you want when the instinct hits you(and do not drink water at the same time)..... Isn't that what Instincto is after all about?

[eveheart]

The natural hygiene movement of the 1800s probably has some merit. The basis of correct food combining is the way different macronutrients get digested and absorbed along the digestive tract. Separating meat from fruit, for example, is done because meat digests in the acidic stomach, while the simple sugars in fruits don't need an acid treatment, and starches start digestion with saliva in the mouth. I've heard many people claim that food combining is good remedy for indigestion.

I don't combine foods much for reasons of practicality - if I am chowing down on a nice hunk of meat, I'm not about to find something else to go with it unless I'm following social eating rules invented at the king's table. But the king could order all his serfs to tote in a variety of food, whereas my ancestors probably ate what was around at the moment.

[cherimoya_kid]

Fats at breakfast, meat at lunch, fruit at dinner. Ideally, anyway.

[JeuneKoq]

Who cares about times of day for eating? Just eat whatever you want when the instinct hits you(and do not drink water at the same time)..... Isn't that what Instincto is after all about?

I guess I do overthink things...It's just that I finally feel ready to experiment with raw eating, and I want to do it proper. Also, some instinctos seem to suggest that there is some varying degree of attractiveness of a food type depending on it's rarity, at the time the dietary senses were in use.

yearly (vegetables, roots etc) = mildly interesting
seasonal (fruits) = more interesting
occasional (carcasses, insects, honey) = very interesting

And thus they believe it is interesting to artificially recreate this rarity of foods in the weekly menu, so as to not eat too much of the "very interesting" ones. They'll put meat on their plate maybe twice a week, for eg. Now of course we live in environments that are sometimes very different from the ones our ancestors first evolved in, and the food variety is different too (not a lot of fruits this time of the year if you live in Alaska), so our needs must have changed as well (eg: less fruits, more meat in winter).

anyways, thanks all for your answers

[sabertooth]

During the heyday of paleo humans, there were many very different instinctive approaches, practiced in accord with the local environmental conditions.

Apex predictor tribes in a well stocked land, or fishing people near an ocean, could get all the meat they could possibly want...leaving them to gather and forage for whatever other local and seasonal foods where desirable and also available.

To artificially create the dietary conditions our ancestors evolved under seems nearly an impossible feat. The fact that we are able to arbitrarily pick and chose from primarily post neolithic engineered foods, goes against the whole instinctive paradigm. Cultivation has changed everything, including our instinctive resonance to foods. Fruits are hundreds of times larger and sweeter.... veggies are much larger, less bitter, more starches, than they were in paleo times. Trying to instinctively chose from cultivated foods and believing you are recreating the kind of nutritional balance our well adapted nomadic hunter gathering ancestors had, is unrealistic...though in digression, it still is a good place to start for someone transitioning from standard neolithic diets.
 

[van]

Fats at breakfast, meat at lunch, fruit at dinner. Ideally, anyway.

You obviously appear to do quite well with this, as I've read it before..   For me, eating fruit at night causes a rise in blood sugar, and hence insulin with accompanying cortisol, and plays havoc with interfering with the bodies natural production of human growth hormone produced heavily during sleep.   A regular sugar meal also would keep me in a sugar burning mode vs fat burning mode.  And later at night as the blood sugar would drop, so would the body's need to replenish it's fuel, and that ( as I have read ) for a sugar burner, is done indiscriminately by using muscle over fat.   
   It might feel light and leave you with an empty stomach in the morning ( good thing ) but the same feeling by using some real discipline and not overeating especially late at night.   For some this can be a real challenge, especially for some who live alone, as food can be high on the list for entertainment. 
   Just my two cents..  but regardless,  I say experiment, and let the experiment take place for a long long time before you take it as gospel.   Insulin resistance builds over many years and can be very hard to detect, unless you're completely vigilant and without preconceived beliefs that can blind you.    This I know first hand.

[TylerDurden]

Everybody's metabolism is different. For me, I do much better if I do not eat anything in the mornings, just  drinking water. I far prefer eating from c. 4pm onwards, if not 7-8pm onwards, and then mainly raw meats/fat. In the summer, though, I far prefer eating either nothing at all or just fruits, due to still not being very heat-tolerant.

[Inger]

I eat meat/seafood 3 times / day mostly. Every meal has almost only animal food in it. I must be a carnivore

It makes me sated and happy.. I eat seasonal and in the cold months there is nothing as animal food around.
Sometimes I cheat with cucumber and salad because I like their juiciness but I do great with them. No fruit at all tho.

I try to eat not late, occasionally I do but it does me no good. So I try to have my last meal finished before 5-6 PM. I really feel my best and have the greatest sleep when I eat a real early dinner

[cherimoya_kid]

Avoiding eating close to bedtime is a good idea, but I'd say it's more the AMOUNT you eat at night that is the issue.

Also, people with adrenal weakness due to stress, etc. do need to eat more than 3 times daily, usually.

[Arrow]

I ate instinctively for three months in Hawaii. We all had roughly the same schedule:

From wake up time to late morning = Drink water, coconut water and/or wheatgrass; basically continued digestive cleansing.
Late morning to late afternoon = Mono-fruit meals or coconut flesh.
Late afternoon to bed time = Usually one large protein meal; beef or durian were most common.
After a meal of meat, from time to time we would browse on perennial vegetables.

I'm picking up instinctive eating again, eight years later, in a very different climate in north-eastern USA. So far I enjoy cleansing with wheatgrass and water until late morning. Then I eat one to three meals, usually consisting of a single fruit type each. And then in the late afternoon/evening I eat one or two meals of protein. Yesterday I had a meal of beef in the late afternoon, and another meal of eggs after dark. Where do vegetables fit in? I don't know!

One thing I really appreciate about this instinctive way of eating is that the emphasis is on finding your own successful patterns. Trust your senses, but until they're giving you all the information you need I suggest keeping things really simple. Eating to comfort emotions is my largest obstacle to eating in harmony with my body, so a clear schedule of meals helps me to resist these urges.

Happy eating!